Análisis de la encuesta

But that was then, this is now. The cold war is, itself, ancient history. More than 20 years have passed since the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989, and by that time historicist assaults on logical empiricist orthodoxy – led, of course, by Kuhn – had signifi cantly weakened the philosophical foundations upon which dogma like the discovery–justifi cation distinction rested. Not surpris-ingly, a new openness to history had begun to manifest itself in the philoso-phy of science arena by the late 1980s. There were various expressions of this new trend. It was, for example, just one year a er the fall of the wall, in 1990, that HOPOS – the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science was founded (see Howard 1997a), partly in response to the then rapidly expanding new literature answering to that description, some of it new editions and translations of original source material, such as was presented in the “Vienna Circle Collection’ of the Boston Studies in the Phi-losophy of Science, a collection launched in 1973 with publication of the fi rst of two volumes of O o Neurath’s papers in English translation (Neurath 1973). Important new secondary literature was also beginning to appear, a signifi cant example being Alberto Coff a’s The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap (Coff a 1991). It was in 1992 that a new journal, Perspectives on Science, was launched with the express purpose of serving as a venue for philosophy, history and sociology of science, as well as scholarship combining and bridg-ing these specializations. The trend accelerated durbridg-ing the decade of the 1990s, with richly hybridized work such as Michael Friedman’s pioneering and seminal study, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Friedman 1992).

What made possible the philosopher’s new embrace of history? It was partly, of course, that a new generation of scholars was emerging who were largely innocent of the prejudices and fears engendered and reinforced by the cold war intellectual politics of the immediate postwar period. It was partly that, as mentioned, three decades of criticism of logical empiricist orthodoxy made impossible the merely ritual invocation of shibboleths like the discov-ery–justifi cation distinction. It was partly that, in the space opened up by the retreat of logical empiricist orthodoxy, innocent antiquarian interest in the

philosophical history of science and the history of philosophy in science – the kind of interest once expressed in the work of thinkers like Koyré and Metzger – could again thrive. In that same space, one could now again safely assert that even systematic philosophical problems have histories of such a kind that one does not really know what the problem is until one has understood how it came to be a problem in the fi rst place. It was also partly that philosophers puzzled by how the philosophy of science could have thought itself into the cul-de-sac in which the fi eld found itself by the end of the 1980s, with the near death of now old-fashioned general methodology and general philosophy of science, turned to the history of the philosophy of science for answers. Lastly, it was partly a ma er of new philosophical projects discovering again that descriptive historical scholarship could function in an evidentiary manner with respect even to systematic philosophical claims with putatively norma-tive import. This was the way in which Mach and Meyerson had once under-stood the bearing of history upon the philosophy of science.

Surely the most widely discussed such neo-Machian and neo-Meyerso-nian project of the last 20 years, a historically legitimated and yet systematic, philosophical project, is Friedman’s new defence of the contingent a priori as aff ording a philosophical meta-framework that respects the historicity of science while locating in science suffi cient transient, but also paradigm- independent, structure so as to block the slide into relativism threatened by Kuhnian incommensurability claims (Friedman 2001). Friedman follows the very young Reichenbach (1920) in disentangling apodicticity, which is to say, necessity, from the constitutive or constructive aspect of Kant’s a priori, rejecting the former, and asserting that the la er is, nonetheless, still essen-tial to understanding how scientifi c cognition works. Constitutively, a priori structures are still required, structures that are a priori in the sense of being necessary conditions for the possibility of our theories having empirical con-tent, but what those structures are might change with progress in science.

This is what happens when Kant fi nally assimilates the lesson of Einstein on relativity.

The present chapter is not the place in which to rehearse all of the details of Friedman’s project, nor to summarize the many critical responses it has evoked.¹⁰ What is important to emphasize here is the essential role of histori-cal evidence in Friedman’s arguments for claims such as that the principle of equivalence plays a contingent a priori role in Einsteinian space-time theory and theory of gravitation,¹¹ and that some such contingent a priori principles must be at play in all science, even if the specifi c principles change as one moves from, say, Newton to Einstein. Even more so than was the case with Meyerson’s historical argument for enduring a priori structures in the form of conservation laws (Meyerson 1908), Friedman’s claims about contingent a priori structures can be defended only on the basis of historical evidence.

For if the claim depends in detail upon the specifi c manner in which these contingent a priori structures change from one stage of history to the next, how else but through careful history can one carry on the argument?

Drill down deeper, and various more specifi c questions about Friedman’s historical method in the philosophy of science come into view. One of particular interest concerns the comparative evidentiary weight to be accorded to the historian’s reconstructions versus the historical actors’ self understandings.¹² But, again, this is not the place to pursue even this impor-tant question in detail. The main point to emphasize is simply that the exam-ple of Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason project makes vivid, as would many others that one could now cite, the extent to which old assumptions about the alleged separation between history and philosophy of science are no longer valid. Common sense now holds that the marriage of history and philosophy of science is a stable and happy one.

Acknowledgement

A portion of the research upon which this paper is based was supported by NSF research grant no. SES-0724550.

Notes

 1 It is worth remembering that Gillispie was the editor of the fi rst edition of Dictionary of Scientifi c Biography (Gillispie 1970–1980).

 2 The title in the standard English translation – The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Exposition of Its Principles – importantly misrepresents the sense of the German title.

 3 For background, see Zimmermann (1967).

 4 Stadler 1997 (English translation: 2001) is a good place to start.

 5 Standard sources include Uebel (1992) and Cartwright et al. (1996).

 6 For more on the political situation inside the Vienna Circle and its implications for logical empiricist philosophy of science, see Howard (2003).

 7 Uebel (1992) and Cartwright et al. (1996) are good sources for understanding how politics sneaks into the protocol–sentence debate.

 8 For a more extensive analysis of the way in which Reichenbach in 1938 is having an argument with Neurath’s more value-laden conception of science and philosophy, see Howard (2006).

 9 Howard (2003) and Reisch (2005) provide extensive background on the political embedding of postwar, North American philosophy of science. McCumber (2001) tells a similar story about how specializations like meta-ethics displaced normative ethics owning to similar political pressures during the McCarthy period, and how the more general philosophical turn towards a socially disengaged analytic philosophical project benefi ed the discipline’s institutional development in that political context.

10 Domski and Dickson (2010) is the place to go for more on both the Friedman project itself, and what the critics and fans are saying about it.

11 This specifi c argument is disputed in Howard (2010). As originally formulated by Einstein, the principle of equivalence asserts the physical equivalence of a uniform, homogenous gravitational fi eld and a corresponding acceleration of a frame of reference. It is now customary to distinguish several diff erent forms of the equiva-lence principle; see Ciufolini and Wheeler (1995).

12 On this point, with specifi c reference to Einstein and the role of the principle of equivalence, see again Howard (2010).

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Part II

Current Research